Gerald Brennan by candlelight

continued

Music or SKR Classical when those stores existed, or perhaps as classical editor at the All Media Guide before he moved on to other things.

All those many careers were merely day jobs; in reality, Gerald Brennan is a composer. He started composing when he was a kid growing up in Dearborn, and he kept composing after he moved to Ann Arbor in 1975. When Brennan got to Ann Arbor, he also produced concerts as the head of the Sinewave Sessions, an independent studio dedicated to the performance of new music, including works by Brennan and other local composers and by contemporary greats like Ligeti and Stockhausen. But even Sinewave was merely a day job, because Brennan remained a hardworking composer with a huge number of pieces in an enormous range of genres from string quartets to the full-length musical Penelope, from tone poems to the Sinfonia Matrix, an orchestral work for 100 instrumentalists built on eight-bar melodies which, if performed in its entirety, would last one septillion years.